Best Quote on Torture
This quote is taken from an interview with Eric Haney. Haney is no dove; he’s one of the founders of the elite, US Army-unit Delta Force.
Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney …
A: (Interrupting) That’s Cheney’s pursuit. The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It’s about vengeance, it’s about revenge, or it’s about cover-up. You don’t gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It’s worse than small-minded, and look what it does.
I’ve argued this on Bill O’Reilly and other Fox News shows. I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He’s an employee of yours. It’s worse than ridiculous. It’s criminal; it’s utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I’m saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don’t do it. It’s an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, “Well, they do it to us.” Which is a ludicrous argument. … The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what’s legal and what we believed in. Now we’re going to throw it away.
Brilliant. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for blogging this first.
What about the French experience in Algeria? In the battle of Algiers, the French used torture in an urban environment to great effect, as it is one of the few ways of rapidly getting intelligence from an individual in time to act on the intelligence. There’s a reason why torture is one of the few institutions that has survived all historical periods under every political system known to man-it works, and is more than just the indulgence of a sick individual.
Here (http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/
2004/06/21/torture_algiers/index.html) is an article that contradicts the popular belief that the Battle of Algiers was won through the implementation of institutionalized torture. Instead, the article finds that overwhelming French force along with a number of other information systems gave the French the edge.
“The French won the Battle of Algiers primarily through force, not by superior intelligence gathered through torture. Whoever authorized torture in Iraq undermined the prospect of good human intelligence. Even if the torture at Abu Ghraib served to produce more names (”actionable intelligence̶
and recruit informants, torture in the end polarized the population, eliminating the middle that might cooperate. Dividing the world into “friends” and “enemies,” those who are with us or against us, meant that we lost the cooperation of those who wished to be neither or who were enemies of our enemies.”